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Before Us Like a Land of Dreams
A Novel
by Karin Anderson
"This masterwork flouts expectations."
—FOREWARD REVIEWS, Starred Review
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
May 2019 | Fiction | 9781948814034 | 320 pp | $18.95
"Literary and true, this is the hardest—and best—kind of book, taking no prisoners, forgiving nothing, demanding all. Read it to confirm your membership, fierce and fragile, in the great imperfect human race."
—JULIE NICHOLS, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and heretic, as well as the author of What Falls Away and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She is also co-editor of the anthologies Blossom as the Cliffrose and Utah Lake Stories. Her work has appeared in Dialogue, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
WHAT FALLS AWAY: A Novel
Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out of her community by religious leaders. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after nearly forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of the child she was forced to give up for adoption. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her. What Falls Away is a stunning novel about family, art, and the raw process of healing.
"A powerful novel that will resonate with anyone who has returned to a place they no longer recognize as home."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE:
Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild
Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild features original poems and prose by talented writers who are faithful, non-faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de-converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter-day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges us to examine the myriad ways our own deeply rooted heritage shapes our personal relationship with landscape.
“Meditative and energizing, fierce and loving, balanced and rhythmic. An invitation to welcome faith and nature, and to embrace the tensions and beauty that spring from every crack and cranny along the way.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
UTAH LAKE STORIES:
Reflections on a Living Landmark
For millennia, Utah Lake has been the heart of a gracious desert valley, its waters a life-giving bounty for migrating birds and abundant fish, its shores a long-time home for people. Then nineteenth-century settlers, unversed in aridity, wreaked havoc on the lake and the lives it sustained. A World-War-II-era steel mill poisoned the water almost beyond recovery, and introduced species decimated aquatic life. Yet the lake still draws people to its shores, waters, and memories even as communal grief has partly obscured the potent, if tenuous, return of a great jewel of the West. These words arise from complex emotions, striking encounters, and surging hopes for a place that can transcend tragedy, heal community, and answer to past and future generations past and future.
PRAISE FOR BEFORE US LIKE A LAND OF DREAMS
"This masterwork flouts expectations."
—FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review
"This resonant novel is told in a multitude of voices, forming a family saga that is both a revisionist history of Latter–day Saint settlement in the American West and a personal journey. In powerful prose, Anderson lets a chorus of voices tell their own often surprising, sometimes heartbreaking stories."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
"Anderson's fictionalized journey through time was prompted by her mother’s declining health, her son’s hospitalization, rampant wildfires plaguing the region, and a beloved country severely divided. A work of universal appeal."
—LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review
"…bravely wrestles abandoned and underrepresented histories onto the page… a veritable index of abandoned history, almost like the second telling of what should have been included with the first."
—15 BYTES
"Anderson explores the thorny entanglements of family, religion, and self, asking—with crisp, evocative prose—what portion of our lives do we direct, and what portion rests upon the 'dark hazards' of ancestral preordination?"
—JANA RICHMAN, author of Finding Stillness in a Noisy World and The Ordinary Truth
"Literary and true, this is the hardest—and best—kind of book, taking no prisoners, forgiving nothing, demanding all. Read it to confirm your membership, fierce and fragile, in the great imperfect human race."
—JULIE NICHOLS, author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air
"A magnificent orchestra of voices—piercing and holy, naked and singing, ragged and wistful and queer—but each voice, in turn, fiercely intimate and finely wrought. …a book for readers who refuse to be lulled or placated, who demand more heart, more exploration, more character."
—NATE LIEDERBACH, author of Beasts You’ll Never See
"Voices from the American West as idiosyncratic as the Southern voices that make up Faulkner's As I Lay Dying."
—SCOTT ABBOTT, author of Wild Rides and Wildflowers
"Through language rich in metaphor, that is as rhythmic and melodic as a poem, Anderson reveals to her readers that family is more than genetics, home is more than place, and understanding is always fragmented. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams will find a solid place in the canon of literature of the American West."
—LAURA HAMBLIN, author of The Eyes of a Flounder
"Anderson's keen prose shreds the myths of American history…you will find, in Anderson's vision, a stark and truthful reckoning with white legacies."
—MICHAEL WALSH, author of The Dirt Riddles
"A unique amalgam of fiction, where the threads of Mormonism, Shoshone identity, British settlers, and multiracial origins compel a deep reconsideration of what we think we know about our roots and our history."
—THE UTAH REVIEW
